If Avenging Force Ran the Academy

When the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards were first announced a few weeks ago, we read through them with a mixture of happy surprise, ambivalence, resignation, and disappointment. While we felt that some of the nominated films, performances, and technical work were well deserving of recognition, we couldn’t help but feel that many of the others on the list were just not representative of the best of the year. With a few notable exceptions (such as Black Panther’s Best Picture nomination), we felt like the nominations tended to overlook genre and family films in favor of somber dramas, biopics, and period pieces. We also noticed — again, with a couple important exceptions — a tendency to favor narratives that centered, or at least significantly and positively included, characters matching the demographics of the majority of Academy voters (72% male and 87% white, according to last year’s numbers).

This isn’t to say that if your favorite film of the year was nominated for — or wins — an Academy Award on Sunday, that you’re wrong for liking it or being happy about it. But since both Sarah and Lauren went to the movies a lot last year (thanks A-List and MoviePass!), we decided that instead of complaining about what did get nominated, we’d take this opportunity to highlight the films that, in an alternate universe where we ran the Academy, we would’ve nominated as representing the best of 2018.

You’ll notice a lot more genre films on our lists, along with family films and comedies, all of which tend to get overlooked at awards time. We are of the opinion that it takes just as much skill to craft a side-splitting comedy or a breathtaking thriller as it does to create a compelling historical epic or gritty biopic. If we’re the ones doling out awards, we want to recognize good craftsmanship in every type of movie, not just the serious ones.

And since this is our list and we make the rules, we changed up a couple categories. We’ve long felt that the Best Animated Feature category should be amended to Best Family Feature, so that it can stop being padded with undeserving filler films (such as 2017’s Boss Baby and Ferdinand nominations) and can instead highlight films aimed at young audiences that aren’t necessarily animated. However, since animation is its own unique art form, we believe there should also be another Best Animation category that recognizes the craftsmanship of the animators without the implication that the overall film is superior. For the purposes of this post, though, we’re only including the Best Family Feature category, as the Best Animation nominees would honestly stay the same as the current Best Animated Feature nominees.

We also added a category for Best Stunt Coordination, because there really should already be one.

We did decide to stick to the Academy’s caps for how many films we could nominate in each category (as well as its eligibility rules for each category), which was brutal in some cases, but we had to draw the line somewhere.

You’ll also notice we eliminated the categories where we haven’t seen enough qualifying films to make any changes to what was already nominated. So if you notice a category is missing, it’s not because we think it’s less important; it just means we haven’t seen enough of the films that would’ve been in that category to make an informed decision on which ones were the best.

And last but not least, we didn’t pick winners. Not just because it was hard and we didn’t want to (although it was hard and we didn’t want to), but because we wanted to highlight all of our picks as worthy of recognition, and not get bogged down in trying to decide which one is the “best.”